Simon Dekeyser

Assistant Professor

Simon Dekeyser is Associate Professor of Accounting and Auditing at KU Leuven, where he heads the Accounting Research Group across the Antwerp and Brussels campuses. He earned his PhD in Business Economics from KU Leuven and holds a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Applied Economics from the same institution. Simon has served as a visiting scholar at the University of Florida and contributes to academic and professional committees within the Faculty of Economics and Business.

His research focuses on audit quality, auditor market structure, and regulatory impacts on financial reporting. He examines topics such as auditor industry specialization, workload allocation in audit firms, and the effects of EU audit reform on multinational companies. Simon has published in journals including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, and Contemporary Accounting Research. His work addresses issues like auditor incentives, market power, and audit efficiency, and he regularly collaborates on projects exploring behavioral and economic drivers of audit outcomes.

Simon teaches courses in auditing and financial reporting and supervises doctoral research on audit markets and governance. He is actively involved in research projects funded by European and national bodies, bridging academic insights with policy and practice to improve audit quality and transparency.

Workload allocation process within audit firms
Context: Audit firms rely heavily on their intellectually skilled auditors, who manage and lead the engagement team (so-called ‘lead auditors’ in this project). To deliver high-quality audit services to their clients and to offer opportunity for auditors to learn, audit firms should try to achieve proper matching between their clients and the auditors based on compatibility between them. Appropriate matching can constitute a difficult exercise as both the lead auditors and clients may have an important stake that encourages them to intervene in the allocation process. Such interventions may affect the level of audit quality that the audit firm is able to deliver when clients and auditors are not appropriately matched. Objective and method: The objective of this research is to understand how audit firms determine the lead auditor-client pair in terms of appropriate matching. Given that such allocations take place in a work environment where lead auditors and clients have their own demands and as such can intervene in this process, this research further aims to identify the lead auditors’ motivations for intervening in this process. We will conduct semi-structured interviews with lead auditors and planning department staff of audit firms to address our research questions. Contribution: This research aims to open the ‘black box’ of audit firms’ human resources management strategies by zooming in on the process of lead auditor-client matching. Given the potential impact that proper matching between auditor and client has on audit quality, understanding the allocation process in terms of which auditor is assigned to which client is important to academic research and practice. Our research could give audit firms and audit regulators guidance for regulation and best practices when it comes to workload management.
Read PDF
More Info
Empirical Evidence on the Role of Gender in Workload Allocation in Audit Firms
In this paper, we investigate gender differences in the workload allocation process. Using a sample of 3,852 auditor-year observations and 107,213 firm-year observations from Belgium, we find that female auditors are associated with lower total and new workload levels, as measured by the number of (new) clients and the total assets of the (new) clients they serve. We find that the effect of gender on workload is particularly strong for auditors in the early stages of their careers. Furthermore, we find that female auditors are associated with higher audit quality; however, this effect largely disappears when controlling for workload. Our results suggest that differences in workload allocation may be a factor contributing to variations in audit quality levels between female and male auditors. That is, male auditors audit significantly more clients, which may constitute a risk factor to the audit quality they provide.
Read PDF
More Info
Managing an Audit Partner’s Workload and Client Allocation – A Qualitative Study
Based on interviews with 17 audit practitioners, this study examines how audit firms allocate clients to audit partners and manage their partners’ workloads. We find that audit firms increasingly prioritize quality over other incentives when assigning partners to clients. This shift is driven by a more centralized decision-making process, supported by growing demand for audit services and staff shortages, which make central allocation more common. At the same time, firms still struggle to fully apply this quality focus in practice. Constraints such as limited staff availability, commercial incentives and mandatory rotation complicate the allocation process. Our findings also show that individual auditors play an important role in allocation decisions. Firms often accommodate personal preferences, for example by matching partners with clients they enjoy working with or clients located conveniently. Strategic motives, such as enhancing professional identity, status or gaining new skills, also influence the process. While some of these considerations support learning, others may conflict with the aim of prioritizing quality. We further observe that audit firms regularly meet certain client requests due to economic ties. Finally, the monitoring of client allocation is relatively weak. Although firms screen for quality at the start and end of engagements, ongoing quality evaluations are more ad hoc. Firms tend to make meaningful adjustments only when serious issues arise during the audit.
Read PDF
More Info
Workload, Commercial Focus, and Audit Quality – the Moderating Role of Office Culture and Auditor Narcissism
In this paper, we examine how senior auditors’ perceptions of their portfolios relate to audit quality-threatening behaviors (QTBs). Using survey data from 231 senior auditors across five audit firms in the Netherlands, we explore whether perceived workload and commercial focus hinder their performance. Our results show that both perceived workload and commercial focus are positively associated with QTBs, indicating that these factors contribute to lower audit quality. We also examine whether job resources and personality traits moderate these relationships. An office culture with open communication can reduce the positive link between commercial focus and QTBs. In contrast, senior auditors’ grandiose narcissism strengthens the relationship between perceived workload and QTBs, suggesting that narcissistic auditors may be more inclined to cut corners when they feel overloaded.
Read PDF
More Info
Workload allocation process in audit firms
While the allocation of human resources in audit firms is an important research topic, it has received scant research attention to date. Ideally, when audit firms aim at improving audit efficiency and effectiveness, audit firms should properly assign their clients to auditors who manage and lead the engagement team (so-called ‘lead auditors’ in this project) based on the auditor’s expertise level, industry specialization and other relevant factors that benefit audit efficiency and quality. However, lead auditors and clients alike may have their own preferences whereby they try to intervene in the allocation process. These interventions may hamper audit quality and efficiency because other factors than proper matching enter into the allocation process. Prior research on workload allocation mainly focuses on the allocation of audit hours to specific audit engagements across staff ranks and how time pressure related to audit assignments may deteriorate audit quality. Only few studies explore the workload allocation process in terms of assigning clients to lead auditors and the consequences of this assignment for audit quality. Our project focuses on a number of factors related to the allocation of lead auditors within the audit firms.
Read PDF
More Info
Empirical Evidence on Gender Effect and Workload Allocation in Audit Firms
In this paper, we investigate gender differences in the workload allocation process. Using a sample of 3,747 partner-year observations and 107,192 firm-year observations from Belgium, we find that female partners are associated with lower levels of workload in terms of the number of clients they serve. Our results also show that female partners audit fewer new clients. We find that the gender effect on workload is particularly strong for partners in the earlier stages of their careers. For experienced partners, we do not find gender differences in their workload, suggesting that differences between males and females in terms of workload eventually disappear. Further, we find that female auditors have clients with higher audit quality, but when controlling for workload this effect becomes smaller and even disappears in the full and Non-Big 4 sample. Our results suggest that differences in the workload allocation process can be a contributing factor to different levels of audit quality that female partners provide compared to their male counterparts. That is male auditors audit significantly more clients, which may constitute a risk factor for the audit quality they provide.  
Read PDF
More Info
No related news.

Filter projects: 

Project Lead
University Filter
1 - 10 of 52 projects